Just after the Millennium, there was a sort of constant pattern for the RPG crowd in PC gaming. It was the high and glorious time when BioWare was independent, not yet swallowed up EA and at the top of their form, and Obsidian was doing their dead level best to sustain the magic of the old partnership which had been forged with Black Isle. BioWare would release a game, Obsidian would work on the sequel (often under adverse conditions), and RPG fans would gorge themselves on nostalgia and semi-virtualized tabletop fun. Neverwinter Nights was an amazing RPG for its time, particularly with its creation tools so players could create their own maps and adventures. Neverwinter Nights 2 didn’t quite do as well, a pretty good RPG but somehow not quite as engaging despite the more elaborate storyline and better writing. It’s been many years since I played the original, and going through Aspyr Media’s Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition, I’m finding myself running into that weird space where my memory and my present experience don’t quite seem to match up.
Let’s settle something right off the bat: if you’re coming to Neverwinter Nights 2 with the expectation that it’s going to be an experience similar to Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re setting yourself up for a mountain of disappointment. The original Neverwinter Nights and its sequel (and all the expansions both games had) walked so Baldur’s Gate 3 could run. You’re looking at a piece of gaming history. Holding it to exactly the same standard as a recent RPG title is completely ridiculous. Better to appreciate Neverwinter Nights 2 in its own right instead of trying to force invidious comparison.
With that caveat in mind, Neverwinter Nights 2 is far from a bad game. The main campaign makes full use of the “D&D 3.5″ ruleset and presents us with a different section of the Sword Coast while also keeping the events of Neverwinter Nights preserved as in-game history. In this respect, it’s a true sequel, even if the protagonist and storyline is different, much like starting a new campaign at the tabletop after your last party saved the world. All three expansions for Neverwinter Nights 2 are brought back as well, taking you from the Sword Coast to Rashemen (homeland of fan favorite characters Minsc and Boo) in Mask of The Betrayer, to the trackless jungles of Chult in Storm of Zehir, and even the dark and dirty streets of Westgate on the Dragon Coast in Mysteries of Westgate. For fans of the Forgotten Realms setting, it’s bliss. For those whose exposure has been limited to the 5th Edition of D&D, it’s probably a little baffling.
Visually speaking, there’s probably been a little bit of cleanup on Neverwinter Nights 2 in its enhanced edition, although it might be hard to notice. The original release of the Aurora Engine was pretty good in 2002, and Obsidian didn’t make any radical changes when the sequel came out in 2006. An engine nearly a quarter-century old, you’re going to be seeing blocky shapes and the occasional bit of texture cracking. There’s plenty of cool particle effects which add a certain amount of charm considering the passage of time. Day/night cycles are present albeit a little jarring at times, and some of the transparency work will seem a little off to a modern audience. Much like with the recent remaster of System Shock 2, you’re seeing an old engine made to work on modern systems without necessarily going so deep into the code base that it essentially gets remade. That said, I did come across a couple instances of inventory items missing their appropriate icons. It’s a small thing, but for a remaster effort, it feels like an easy fix that the team missed.
From an audio perspective, the remaster team doesn’t appear to have fiddled much with any of the music or voice tracks in Neverwinter Nights 2. The original music from Jeremy Soule (which appeared in the first game) has been preserved and still sounds as good as it did the first time around, as well as the music pieces added to the expansions by different artists. Sound effects are still decent, though perhaps not quite as impactful as they once were, despite their clarity. The voice acting is still well done, even when some characterizations seem a little flat. I will say that I don’t remember the voice acting on the expansions being quite as patchy as they were here. Might be a case of Mandela Effect, but I seem to remember a lot more speaking going on, at least in the expansions.
From a gameplay perspective, at least on console, there seems to have been some serious translation missteps bringing Neverwinter Nights 2 off the PC. The sort of tactical gameplay that Neverwinter Nights 2 used was a natural evolution of the CRPG combat mechanics in early Black Isle/BioWare games like the original Baldur’s Gate. It works great on PC because you have a mouse and keyboard and can input discrete commands in rapid succession across a broad swath of UI. In bringing it over to the console environment, a lot of that speed and flexibility is lost. You’re either having to fiddle around with the various settings on the companions to make sure they don’t get themselves brutally murdered or doing a lot of pausing and taking control of companions just long enough to input a command and hope it takes. It feels a lot more fiddly than I remember, but then again, it’s been a while since I played. On a PC, it’s probably much like it was before, but the porting process seems to have hit some rough spots.
One thing seems to be relatively consistent, and that involves the RNG for dice rolls getting stuck in runs. The sage advice of “save early, save often!” has never been more relevant, because sure as Elminster has a beard, you will get into “runs” of crap dice rolls where your side of a melee will be completely unable hit the broad side of a castle from the inside while the enemy cosplays as a set of Ginsu knives, prompting you to reload. Other times, you’ll be an absolute wrecking ball of steel and fire while your enemies stand there like training dummies. This has always been a problem with CRPGs, and sometimes it’s well hidden. Here, it feels almost glaring.
Beyond this, the parts of Neverwinter Nights 2 which touch on the D&D rules and the Forgotten Realms setting still feel reasonably faithful and mostly sensible. Twelve base character classes (only one, the Warlock, came from something outside the core Player’s Handbook), plus a number of “prestige classes” which a character can pick once they meet certain criteria, still offers up the potential for substantial replay value. If there’s enough interest to do so.
That’s the big hang-up I’ve run into during the review process. After almost twenty years, something feels subtly off about the writing. It’s sweeping and epic, sure. It’s saturated in the lore of Forgotten Realms in a way that the current tabletop ruleset doesn’t seem to be bothered with. As a fan of BioWare, Obsidian, and the setting (not to mention the series when both entries originally released), I should be eating this up with a skiploader and politely declining the Andes thin mint afterwards. Instead, there’s a feeling that the writing hasn’t quite aged as well as I thought it would. The characters don’t feel quite right, the stakes don’t feel suitably built up, and far too many encounters feel like the choice of violence is made before you even get the chance to open your mouth to offer your opponents the chance to save themselves from a gory and ignominious demise. There’s a strong sense of “I ain’t changed but I know I’m not the same” about the whole thing. It’s hard to say if it’s simply a case of the earlier works of writers (Chris Avellone, among others) understandably not feeling as well done compared to their later efforts, or if they were always like this and it just didn’t register until now.
I’m a big proponent of good remasters of classic games. I’ve seen what a good remaster looks like, and I’ve seen some which aren’t quite as successful. The team at Aspyr has certainly gone to some effort to make Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition a good remaster, but for whatever reason, it feels like they fell short somehow. It’s not a great remaster, but it’s far from a bad one. “Middling” is about the best description that comes to mind. Not from a lack of effort, but perhaps as a limitation on the material they had to work with. Past a certain point, you’re getting into remake territory, and one can’t help but wonder what might have been if they had decided to go that route instead. As it is, we’ve got a remaster which preserves a classic game, warts and all, which might well enjoy a new appreciation from different eyes.
Axel reviewed Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.
